Sunday, December 10, 2006

As you might expect, one of the reasons I've been posting so little recently is that it's that time of the semester when everything's been due. In particular, I had a rather long paper for my astrophysics course due as well as a 30 minute presentation on the same topic. Thus, things have been a bit busy. But now that it's all over (well, that part a least. I still have finals to worry about), I think it's worth sharing. So, since I can't invite everyone to the talk, which was last week, I'll make all the files available for download.

First off, here's the paper. It's moderately technical and would probably serve to have at least an introductory course of university level astronomy. But considering how broad the topic was, I couldn't get into any read depth on it. Instead, it's a very brief look at many different mechanisms that contribute to the morphologica and spectral characteristics of planetary nebulae.

The Powerpoint presentation can be found here. It says a lot of the same stuff as the paper, but in a different format obviously. Since the Powerpoint file only highlights the material, and there's a lot of things that I would say out loud that isn't on the slides, you can find a detailed summary of what I said (at least, I hope I said all of it), here.

Also, if you're trying to get the video to play in the Powerpoint presentation, it won't play in there. The video is one I made specially for this presentation and I couldn't get it to export in a file type that Powerpoint would accept without having a ridiculously huge file size for even a low quality version. Thus, if you want to see the video, try here (right-click/Save As to save to your hard drive). It's about 1.4 Mb and is in Quicktime format. You'll need a fairly recent version to have the proper codec.

5 comments:

I do time travel all the time. I picked up a time machine years ago (or maybe i haven't done that yet - i get so confused) at Best Buy. It's got one of those strange acronyms that no one understands - V.C.R.

So, go ahead, feel free to invite people to events that happened in the past.

It does involve a few technical bits, like an understanding of the HR diagram, the Red Giant Branch, atomic structure, the different types of spectra, etc... But this is all stuff that should be understood from an intro astronomy course or with a little bit of private study.

But I don't know how many people reading this blog understand such things. I expect it's a good amount given the title of this blog should attract such people.